Actor Gives Unconventional Roles a Human Face

Philip Seymour Hoffman, his face for the moment more famous than his name, recalls a piece of advice a director once gave him. “When you work on a part, don’t watch a movie. If you’re going to play a gangster, don’t go rent a movie about gangsters. Go find gangsters. . . . Don’t copy someone’s interpretation of something.”

“Because that’s what we do as people,” the actor said. “Form ourselves through somebody else’s interpretation of the real thing.”

It’s a telling recollection for Hoffman, 32, for several reasons. For one, it articulates his actor’s ethos of creating characters, if necessary, “from scratch”--as he did with Rusty, the drag queen who teaches paralyzed ex-cop Robert De Niro to sing in Joel Schumacher’s “Flawless,” which opened last week. It’s a character that may deliver him permanently from the ranks of character actors to . . . . well, character actor with clout.

But it’s also one more unconventional part in a film career that includes “Twister” and “Patch Adams” but has become much more closely identified with the kind of roles he’s played in Todd Solondz’s “Happiness” or Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Boogie Nights.” Characters, in other words, who defy the cozy conformity people have come to expect from the movies.

And it’s these characters that illustrate the other point of Hoffman’s recollection: that as people, rightly or wrongly, we understand the world through how it’s presented in the media. And anything that strays from that immediately is labeled bizarre.

“Seriously,” Hoffman said, the terrace window in his Manhattan hotel room swinging back and forth in the breeze. “The only part of mine that’s really unconventional is Rusty, ‘cause he’s obviously unconventional. The other guys I don’t see that way--I think that’s us wanting to make ourselves feel better. Because I think all of us are pretty damned unconventional. And that’s what great writers, great films, great plays do--show us something we didn’t really want to see. Or turn perceptions on their heads.”

Hoffman, in a Carolina Softball T-shirt, looking much leaner and even blonder than he does on screen, had just done four days of interviews--many of the questions, not unexpectedly, dealing with this perception of his supposedly dysfunctional characters.

“I was talking to someone the other day who asked me this kind of question,” Hoffman said, “and I looked at him and thought, ‘Hey, buddy--you’re normal?’ The way he looked and was talking, I’m thinking: Listen to the rhythms of the way you talk. Do you know how high your voice sounds? The quirks you have? The way that you look? Do you think if someone portrayed you accurately in a film, people would be like, ‘Hey, that guy--he’s playing a leading man role!’ Nobody’s like that. Humans aren’t like that.”

And humans aren’t usually represented in the movies.

“That’s exactly what I’m saying. And, hopefully, that’s what I try to do--with some artistic sense--because, again, we find out what humans are through film and TV and advertising, which is usually a very, very nice interpretation of what we are--usually a very polite, nice, commercial interpretation of our race.”

Hoffman, raised in Rochester, N.Y., and graduated from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, does as much theater as he does film--he opens in March in Sam Shepard’s “True West” at Manhattan’s Circle in the Square, sharing the stage with his “Boogie Nights” co-star John C. Reilly. Hoffman (and Reilly) will also appear in Anderson’s highly anticipated “Magnolia,” and Anthony Minghella’s “The Talented Mr. Ripley” with Matt Damon and Gwyneth Paltrow, both of which open this month. Add his less recent films--”The Big Lebowski,” “Scent of a Woman,” “When a Man Loves a Woman,” “Nobody’s Fool,” “The Getaway”--plus David Mamet’s just-completed “State and Main,” and you get the feeling Hoffman never comes up for air.

“I work a lot, but . . . yeah, I work a lot,” he said. “But I have two months off here, three months off there. These films were all shot over a six-month span of time, but I only had the lead in one of them. And ‘Flawless’ was very low-budget, so I did that in six weeks.”

It was prior to that six weeks, of course, that Rusty really took shape.

“With most characters, I have a feel for what I want to do--just an instinct of where to go,” he said. “With this, I was like, ‘Wow, I don’t know what I’m gonna do, I don’t know what this is.’ I didn’t think I was the right guy for it, but Joel thought I was. And De Niro, who was producing the film, didn’t even want to meet me.”

As in, didn’t think he needed to.

“So I proceeded to look at it some more and saw there were things to key into, but it was all . . . work. Practice. One of those kind of roles you’re practicing all the time, so when the time comes, you’re ready.”

Practice. And research. “I did a lot of research about how this guy would act and talk. There’s a lot of stuff out there about transgender guys. And women, too. And also some good documentaries about these fellas who work in the drag world--’Paris Is Burning’ is a big one. There are a couple of guys in that who are transgender. They’re not post-op, they’re mostly doing the hormonal stuff, some augmentation, they still have their penises. So I watch them, and the thing I was most blown away by was how feminine they were. It’s a real life choice; they work at it. When they talk about their life, they don’t talk about it in a sexual way; their dreams are not dreams of sex or anything of that nature. Their dreams are dreams of . . . . lifestyle; one guy wants to get married in a white dress, in a church. Their aspirations are kind of about a normal heterosexual lifestyle. Becoming women, being with men and having families.

Playing Rusty and Not Playing Affected

“So it’s not really about being a drag queen and being gay or anything like that. I had to really look at this and saw that I wasn’t playing a man who was affected--I was playing a man who was that.”

Hoffman agrees that in Rusty there’s a streak of tragedy--not because he’s gay, but because he can’t find his place in the kind of world in which he wants to belong. The theatrical aspects of Rusty, Hoffman says, are being overblown entirely.

“I really don’t find him that theatrical,” the actor said. “I find him--compared to some people in the drag world, at least--I think he’s really kind of subdued. He’s not overly theatrical at all. I find him calm and serious. He has that one speech about theater and his childhood, and how he feels about this. But I see him as me in that way. That he just loves the theater. I don’t see it as anything other than that.”